Sunday, December 10, 2017

Trump is cleaning up journalism

Well, journalists had another stellar week of buying petards from Acme, setting the explosives off, and hoisting themselves high above the ground.

The first ten days of December have seen:

ABC News's Brian Ross lie about General Flynn's plea bargain.

Reuters and Bloomberg News report on an imaginary subpoena of Trump's records at a German bank.

CNN lie about Donald Trump Junior being tipped off about a WikiLeaks.

David Weigel of the Washington Post lie about the size of the crowd at a Trump rally.

Liars all of them.

Byron Tau of the Wall Street Journal tweeted: "CNN corrects its earlier report, which appears to be an honest error from two excellent reporters."

He's a fool.

Wiser heads know better.

I remember Watergate pretty well, and I don't remember anything like this level of journalistic carelessness back then. The constant stream of 'bombshells' that turn into duds is doing much more to damage the media than anything Trump could manage. https://t.co/SA3Frx4KNE

If I ran a news organization, I would kick everyone off Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and whatever else there is. Tweets show bias and feed that bias as well.

Stories would be held until the White House commented.

And they would be accurate.

The first correction would cost a person a day's suspension. The second would cost two days. The third would cost their job.

I would apologize for mistakes.

Trump: "Did you see all the corrections the media's been making?" He says "they've been apologizing left and right." Calls Brian Ross a "fraudster" who should have been fired. Says CNN "apologized" for today's mistake (CNN corrected it but did not apologize)

Credibility is all the press has. The power of the press is people believe it. If people stop believing the press, the power is gone. And the power is gone. Most of the public no longer looks to the press for guidance.

Not one single newspaper in West Virginia endorsed Donald Trump.

He carried every county.

He won because he fights back. He knew something all the other Republicans don't know: the news media is a paper tiger. He is forcing the press to own up to its lies.

Others are joining the cause.

Leftist Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept is calling for CNN to out the anonymous sources who lied about Donald Trump Junior on Friday.

Just last week, the Washington Post decided – to great applause (including mine) – to expose a source to whom they had promised anonymity and off-the-record protections because they discovered that she was purposely feeding them false information as part of a scheme by Project Veritas to discredit the Post. It’s a well established principle of journalism – one that is rarely followed when it comes to powerful people in DC – that journalists should expose, rather than protect and conceal, sources who purposely feed them false information to be disseminated to the public.

Is that what happened here? Did these “multiple sources” who fed not just CNN but also MSNBC and CBS completely false information do so deliberately and in bad faith? Until these news outlets provide an accounting of what happened – what one might call “minimal journalistic transparency” – it’s impossible to say for certain. But right now, it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple sources all fed the wrong date to multiple media outlets innocently and in good faith.

If this were, in fact, a deliberate attempt to cause a false and highly inflammatory story to be reported, then these media outlets have an obligation to expose who the culprits are – just as the Washington Post did last week to the woman making false claims about Roy Moore (it was much easier in that case because the source they exposed was a nobody-in-DC, rather than someone on whom they rely for a steady stream of stories, the way CNN and MSNBC rely on Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee). By contrast, if this were just an innocent mistake, then these media outlets should explain how such an implausible sequence of events could possibly have happened.

The lack of transparency in the press dooms it. Reporters believe they can do no wrong, and since their lies go unpunished, why would they think otherwise?

But their lies are catching up to them.

Legend holds that for the fifth labor, Eurystheus ordered Hercules to clean up the stables of King Augeas, which were particularly nasty because he had many herds of cows, bulls, goats, sheep and horses. The stables had not been cleaned in 30 years.

Rather than get the pitchfork and shovel, Hercules diverted the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth.

And so it goes with the national media. President Trump is using the rivers Twitter and YouTube to wash away the filth.

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Please enjoy my two books about the press and how it missed the rise of Donald Trump.

Nice classic analogy but only by seeing the money dry up will the media change. Unfortunately money does not flow into their stables because of news. Disney has Micky Mouse and Jabba the Hut for example. They are much more productive than Brian Ross. It is they who will determine Bob Eiger's bonus so he don' care. His slave "news" minions know the only way out of the dungeon of obscurity is the downwards path taken by say David Gregory, to insult a president on air in prime time, or better get some dirt from a vengeful deepthroat somewhere. The deep state and socialist corporate haters of DT know these addictions to vanity well, know they cannot be overcome by will or prayers to virtue by Saints Wallace and Hume. The addicted want glory, wealth, a house next to Matt. To get these things they will swim hard to cross Don's Augean river of shit even if Niagra awaits.

The fact that CNN is protecting the multiple sources who provided it with bad information means one thing, and one thing only: the sources are highly placed Congressional Democrats. No two ways about it. And the reason CNN is refusing to name them at the cost of its good name is to protect the Left's narrative about Trump colluding with the Russians. CNN hates Trump more than it values its shredded reputation.

However, I think they were set up as a part of many plots to expose the leakers so that those in power will now who is breaking the law. The bottom line here is that most media and Congressional people are incredibly lazy. They could have looked for themselves at the email to check the date. They either didn't bother to spend 2 minutes to review the email, or looked at it and didn't ask the obvious question of how that date related to the date that Assage made the emails available for the public. Multiple sources giving out the same incorrect date shows me that this was orchestrated.

The journalism schools were target #1 for Gramscians, and they've been successful. No conservative cadet journalist can get through them. Either they will be forced out once their politics are known or their marks will be poor. With poor marks a fresh journalist graduate will never get a job at any MSM operation. Too competitive.

So the Left has a lock on the supply of credentialed journalists.

Fortunately an end run is possible via blogs. Writing for blogs allows kids to win a place in the industry through sheer grit. Blogs are the mail rooms of journalism now.

If folks don't like the classical analogy, how about a modern one. Trump is the Road Runner, and the press is Wiley E. Coyote. Really and truly. Just like the Road Runner, Trump escapes because of the over-elaborate efforts of his opponent (Coyote for Road Runner, the MSM for Trump) to trap him.

I rarely read newspapers anymore, and I wouldn't subscribe to one if my life depended on it. I did glance at one while waiting for a cup of coffee the other day, though, and the first article that caught my eye was about a poor illegal alien who had been picked up by ICE just as he was making bail for a "misdemeanor" sexual assault. His lawyer, and the idiot reporter, were incensed that the feds were enforcing the law.

The link offers a very convincing opinion as to why the mainstream media has issued so many stories that are being exposed as FAKE NEWS. The link elaborates on a theory that the mainstream media are the victims of a sting that's intended to snare the leakers in the deep state.

When I was young lo these many years ago I saw a license plate in NC that I am reminded of by CNN and the NYT, among others.

NC did not require front plates, so it was fashionable to adorn the car with your own. There was also a pretty good rivalry among the Big 3 automakers in NASCAR at that time. The plate I saw had an image of the cartoon coyote wearing a Ford tee shirt, and a huge penis down the throat of the roadrunner. The caption read "Beep, beep, now you sonofabitch."